Founding Engineer

Our client, Hesta Health, is reimagining women's healthcare starting with postnatal care.

Women spend approximately 25% more of their lives in ill health than men, representing a $1 trillion annual lost opportunity globally. Hesta is changing that, and they want a brilliant engineer to help build it.

Fresh from closing their seed round, they're hiring their first Founding Engineer. You'll be the technical backbone of the company — working directly with two exceptional co-founders and their founding team to ship Hesta v1 and lay the foundations for what comes next.

The Role

This is a rare chance to join a mission-driven healthtech startup at day zero and own the entire technical build. You'll work across the stack — frontend, backend, infrastructure — while embedding clinical-grade reliability, data privacy, and AI capabilities from the ground up.

What you'll own:

• Build end-to-end product features across the full stack (frontend, backend, infra)
• Integrate AI/ML capabilities — risk stratification, smart triage, personalisation
• Build privacy-first, regulatory-compliant infrastructure (UK GDPR, NHS DSPT, MHRA)
• Shape and evolve the architecture and technical foundations as the company scales
• Establish a lightweight QMS to enable audit-readiness and regulatory compliance
• Contribute to a fast, iterative product loop — design, ship, learn

Who You Are

Essential:

• 5+ years in high-impact, early-stage product teams: you've shipped and scaled full stack products
• Strong backend (Node.js, Python/Flask, FastAPI) and frontend (React, Next.js, Vue) fundamentals
• ML/data science proficiency: Python, SQL, pandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch/TensorFlow
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Proven ability to build data-secure, privacy-compliant infrastructure
• Product-minded: you think in outcomes, not just code
• Startup-ready: resourceful, comfortable with ambiguity, bias to action

Bonus:

• Experience in women's health, digital therapeutics, or regulated healthtech
• Deployed LLMs or predictive models in production environments
• Familiarity with FHIR, HL7, or secure health data pipelines
• Hands-on LLM work: prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning (LoRA/QLoRA)

The Package

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity
• Work directly with and be mentored by two highly experienced co-founders
• Spacious office in Victoria (bike storage, changing facilities, good coffee)
• 25 days annual leave + public holidays
• Immediate, company-defining impact — this is day zero

Interview Process

1. Values & Competencies interview (1 hour, virtual)
2. Technical interview — 90 mins (45 min chat + 45 min live task)
3. Final 2-hour in-person interview with co-founders

Hesta strongly encourages applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Interested? Reach out to Kelly Gauthier (kelly@highersearch.co) or George Alexander (george@highersearch.co)

***This company is not currently offering sponsorship to foreign candidates. If you are not able to live and work in London without sponsorship, please do not apply***